Thursday, 15 December 2011

Slightly Right of Centre: Notes and thoughts from Ed Vaizey copyright and web blocking round table, 7th December: "MPAA are in the process of obtaining injunctions against other big ISPs to force them to block Newzbin (after an injunction was won against BT and other ISPs refused to implement a voluntary block). The remaining Statutory Instrument (SI) needed to complete the Digital Economy Act should be published late January. This order dictates how the process of dispatching warning letters to those accused of copyright infringement and hearing appeals will be run. After one year in operation, the warnings can be supplemented with a "3-strikes" scheme, bringing penalties -technical measures - for those accused 3 times of copyright infringement. In fact two SIs need to be approved by Parliament before the measures come in to force. Whilst one has already cleared the hurdle of notification to the European Commission (a 3-month standstill period to allow comment from other member states), the second will not start this process until end of January. The delay is so that any findings from an ongoing Judicial Review into the Act can be incorporated (this wasn't said explicitly at the meeting, but I heard this from other reliable sources). DCMS and Ofcom officials did confirm that the first warning letters are unlikely to arrive on doormats until late spring to summer 2013 - that's three years after Her Majesty signed the Act!" Just as I predicted in June 2009...but then Mystic Marsden also predicted the grounds for judicial review at the same time...